Cross-Building Slackware as a whole?
 

Hi,

is there a chance to do some cross-builds of Slackware, possibliy using some other distribution as a build host?

I'm asking because I want to create optimised binaries for (1) Athlon XP, (2) Pentium Classic, (3) i386 (of course, that's going to be a pretty minimal system...).

From other threads on LQ I take that
- Slack is optimized for P4
- runs on i486, nevertheless
- optimised builds of packages don't make much difference (someone states that Gentoo doesn't appear to be a lot faster than Slackware).

Now, I've experimented with source builds of individual packages on some other Linux distros, and I'd confirm that, with one exception: Java applications startup a lot faster with an optimised kernel. They don't *run* that much faster, but they are loaded much more quickly.

Because of this, and as one of my potential target platforms is i386, I'd be interested to know if there's a ready-made script or program that (cross-) compiles all Slackware packages at once.

Does anynone know of such a tool?

Thank you very much, and thanks to the LQ people for creating thiis friendly space, regards

gargamel

In a word "no". Different people on alt.os.linux.slackware have talked about projects of something like this, no one so far has felt the need to invest that much time and trouble. Feel free to get the build scripts from the sources disks of Slackware, alter each one for whatever optimization you prefer and build them.

Thank you.

Yes, of course, I could modify the package build scripts and get any optimisation I want.
A couple of considerations have prevented me from doing so, until now.

(1) It's a lot of work to change all the build scripts individually. It may be possible to find a way to automate the modification process using standard Unix tools like (g)awk/sed. But this will only be possible if the build scripts for all packages are similar (probably they are).

(2) One of the target machines is pretty low-spec. It would take *very* long to compile the packages on that machine. Because of this I'd prefer a cross-build, ie compile the packages for that old laptop on my primary development machine.
Now, there's a problem: My intended 'build host' is not running Slackware. It's currently running SuSE 9.1.
I've tried to build ROCK Linux on it, but failed due to the fact that some of the tools weren't available in the respective version required by ROCK. I'm afraid the same could (and probably would) happen if I tried to compile Slack on it. The ROCK people say, that ROCK build comfortably only on ROCK (well, I ran into kind of a bootstrap problem, here...).

Well, I could check all this out, myself, of course. However, experiments of this kind tend to be extremely time consuming. So I hope to find people who have done it already, and are willing to share their experiences here.

Thank you, agein!

Best wishes

Gargamel